Plugin - Buddypress Activity Plus - Question

Hello WPMUDEV!!!
I am all excited about your new plugin released for Buddypress - BP Activity Plus! This is almost exactly what I have been looking for. This plugin provides a much needed improvement for ease of use and socialization/sharing within buddypress. It also allows educational institutions to almost create an open source version of the Edmodo.com site.

My Question
Is there anyway you will be releasing a version of Buddypress Activity Plus that will include document uploading such as PDF, DOC, DocX, etc.

Or could you tell me how to modify the plugin to add a more robust file uploader? Is it as simple as modifying and adding extensions? I tried looking through the code and saw a few places where it limited file uploads to jpg, jpeg, png, gif. but I am unsure if it would work by adding a new extension that is not an image format such as pdf, ppt, doc, etc.

Comments 11

I'm not sure about future development, to be honest so I'd have to defer to one of the developers on that. I can guess that it's unlikely to include uploading as such as I think it's more geared to linking but that's not to say it won't and we do gear development around user suggestions.

The photo embedding also includes an uploading feature that allows you to upload photos from your desktop to be embedded in the activity stream. So, yes, it does allow uploading currently except it is limited to image file extensions.

I did find that I could add more file types by adding them in these two files:
js/bpfb_interface.js LINE 213 "allowedExtensions": ['jpg', 'jpeg', 'png', 'gif', 'pdf'],
and
lib/class_bpfb_binder.php. There is LINE 163$uploader = new qqFileUploader(array('jpg', 'jpeg', 'png', 'gif', 'pdf'));

As you can see I added pdf and when I tried to upload a pdf it would indeed work, but it would fail when it tried to generate a thumbnail.

Could this plugin be integrated to work with a fourth plugin called Buddypress Documents where it would tap into the Buddypress Documents plugin and allow you to upload and embed a link to the file from the other plugin?

With that one improvement this would be a firstclass all in one plugin that would do a complete job for sharing documents and media. This could be a turning point for adoption in the K12 educational arena. It would really simplify things for teachers as they could create a group for their class and then use all the great features to post homework papers and media for students!

@kennibc, uploading the files themselves is not the problem, the main thing is how to handle them afterwards. Making the plugin play nice with the Documents plugin is a challenging, but interesting idea.

However, given your usage scenario, there is a feature that is already in there that may possibly work for you. For "Add video" field we're using the WordPress oEmbed functionality for embedding the videos, but in this way you should be able to embed just about anything from this list:

This also includes scribd documents. I have tested it with a few scribd documents, and it did work nicely. Obviously, the workflow is different to what you described, but perhaps that's something you can use?

@BlueEyes, this plugin is for BuddyPress only - it will not work with regular WordPress installs.

As for uploading the audio files, unfortunately this is currently not possible.

Hello VeBailovity,
I like your workaround for embedding documents, but that is like a three step process that involves uploading files daily to scribd and then going back to buddypress and embedding the file. It seems like a lot of work for a teacher just to upload a document such as a worksheet.

Could the documents be uploaded just like photos and then instead of thumbnails being generated, it simply lists the filename as a download link??

What do you think?

It could have it's own button but function just about the same as the photo uploader.

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